Joshi is angry. At school, Linus and the others laughed at him because of his pink tulle dress. It doesn’t help that his mother thinks he’s “brave”. “But I don’t think it’s brave at all. I just like clothes,” replies Joshi. In the premiere of “When the world learned to go backwards”, the first play for a young audience by the Munich author Lena Gorelik (“More Black Than Purple”) in the Pathos Theater, Joshi is a puppet. Just like the girl Mira, from whom the grandfather wants to know why there was trouble at school today. The teacher called and told him that Mira had used the first-name form and refused to go into the playground. “Rules suck. I don’t understand why there are rules,” says Mira. She doesn’t like to get up at a certain time, she doesn’t understand that the teacher has to use her initials while she’s allowed to use first names, and she would prefer to have dessert as the main course and go to school on Sundays and definitely not on Tuesdays.
While Judith Huber, as the embodiment of the “normal, ultra-nervous world, in which everything is the same as always”, is dressed in cool, correct white from hat to feet, Angelika Krauzberger as “another world, in which everything is different” is in a white black fur overalls. In this different world, which is ushered in and accompanied by music by Marcus Grassl and Toshio Kusaba with drum rolls and singing, Joshi’s mother warns him in the morning to stay in bed. Later, his underpants fall on his head and his classmate Linus suddenly shows up at school in a beautiful green dress himself. Mira’s situation is similarly twisted: When the alarm clock rings to get up, her grandfather wants to take her to the playground instead of going to school – and asks for an ice cream for breakfast himself. No question, everything is different. But: “Different isn’t always better,” Mira and Joshi say as they sit down on a bench, exhausted from their irritating experiences. Actually, they don’t like both worlds. “But what do we want?” they ask themselves at the end of the 45-minute piece.
The great storyteller Katharina Ritter recently said that children have a very keen sense of whether someone wants to tell them something or simply tells them something. Gorelik’s textbook reversal of social expectations and individual desires falls more into the first category. Pretty ideas like the polonaise, which the two rock-wearing musicians put on, do little to change that (still on January 15, 4 p.m.).